Moss, Sarah

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Moss, Sarah

PERSONAL:

Education: Oxford University, B.A., M.St., D.Phil.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Canterbury, Kent, England. Agent—Anna Webber, PFD, Drury House, 34-43 Russell St., London WC2B 5HA, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Kent, Canterbury, England, faculty member.

WRITINGS:

Scott's Last Biscuit: A History of Polar Exploration and Its Writing, Signal (London, England), 2005, published as The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration, BlueBridge (New York, NY), 2006.

Sweet Surrender: Food and Gender in British Women's Writing, Manchester University Press (Manchester, England), 2008.

Coeditor of a food series from Manchester University Press.

SIDELIGHTS:

As a doctoral student at Oxford University, Sarah Moss surveyed the writings of centuries of polar explorers as she investigated how their works affected the literary world as a whole, and vice versa. Moss expanded on her thesis to compose her first book, Scott's Last Biscuit: A History of Polar Exploration and Its Writing. Published as The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration in the United States, the book presents the writings of both famous and obscure explorers, assessing the allure of travel to remote and forbidding regions of ice and tundra, and delving into ways that polar exploration has influenced travel writing. BookLoons contributor Anise Hollingshead remarked that Moss "does a good job of adding information and opinions in a seamless fashion" and that "most of her comments and descriptions add an informed and thoughtful insight into the written accounts" of the explorers. George Cohen further commented in a review for Booklist: "This remarkable book offers the most vivid account yet of polar exploration."

Another of Moss's research interests is the treatment of eating and cooking in women's writing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cultural history of food and its relationship to nationality, sexuality, and gender is explored in her second book, Sweet Surrender: Food and Gender in British Women's Writing.